Friday 10 November 2023 – Selecting Our Leaders
“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government” so said our peasant filth collector from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (see Culture and Technology Lock). Instead, his (or her?) village didn’t have a Lord but, rather, was an anarcho-syndicalist commune. Villagers take it in turn to act as an executive officer but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified by a civil majority. It’s complicated but it has got to be better than unelected rule by king selected by the assumed divine providence attained through primogeniture; of being the first born to the previous king. King Arthur’s dad, of course, wasn’t king, not that either actually existed, but someone had to come first, and, in lieu of there previously being a king of the Britons, his divine right was determined by whomever wielded Excalibur. Whether you adhere to the teachings of Proudhon like the filth collector, or cleave to Arthurian legend, as Harry Hill regularly reminds us, you’ve got to have a system.
Set scene: Senior Leadership Team to determine a strategy:
SLT member 1: We must take pride in H&F and create a compassionate council.
SLT member 2: Yes, but what is it that councils actually do?
Officer selected to take the minutes of the meeting: We deliver services to residents.
SLT member 1: Oh yes. We must have compassionate services… or we must have compassion for our residents’ situation and deliver services accordingly. Which is it?
Officer: The second one.
SLT member 3: So how do we do that?
SLT member 2: Commission someone else to do it.
…the AD had no experience of leading procurement for a public authority or any knowledge of public procurement legislation or practices. It seems more likely that the medieval peasant was more familiar with the governance of workers’ co-operatives than she would be of managing public expenditure. Yet she was appointed to being ultimately in command of the processes for, and governance of, spending £650m of tax-payers’ money each year.
The constitution of the council states that appointments must be ratified through a process of job interview (see Don’t Be Consulted When It’s About You). So, presumably, the AD was interviewed. I assume questions about public procurement didn’t come up because she was successful over the other applicants, if any. I doubt there were other candidates, because who else would apply that could know less than her? And I’m sure hers was just a “light touch” chat to jump through the hoops required by the constitution; her appointment preordained by divine right as determined by her lofty chums.
This is always the way working for a modern council, whether that chumocracy is based on an Old Boys Club, ethnic groups such as took over Haringey in the 2000s (Irish) and Enfield most recently (Turkish). Or in the early 2010s when the Chief Executive of Barnet Council was sacked for commissioning almost every council service, including internal services, to Capita, so was welcomed as CEX by Haringey Council at which turn of events he took the opportunity to bring with him his Senior Leadership Team from Barnet but, rather than recruit them into SLT posts which only pay a measly six-figure annual salary, instead employed them semi-permanently into “consultant” roles paying them a four-figure sum every day. It was simple theft (as in the commonly understood meaning of the term rather than the narrower idea of Proudhon’s assertion that all property is theft), made famous by the Director of HR’s daily rate being published by Private Eye in their Rotten Borough segment with the (worryingly misogynistic) caption, “Because she's worth it”. Or when a new Executive Director of Place (that includes the Planning and Economic Development services) was appointed to Enfield Council in the late 2010s and she brought with her her own recruitment agency which she owned and she appointed it (her) to lead on all recruitment of her directorate and lavishly paid the agency (her) commission for referring candidates to the council (her) which it (she) appointed. When I worked at Enfield Council then, I asked the Head of Legal why an officer was allowed to get away with such a blatant conflict of interest. She told me it was because she had declared it in the Register of Interests. I pointed out to her (and may I remind the reader here that this was the Head of Legal, the Chief Solicitor of the council) that by declaring the interest did not make it okay, but, rather, that the Register of Interests was to ascertain that those interests declared did not conflict with one’s duties as an officer. She found my interpretation intriguing and said she would investigate. Very soon after she was mysteriously no longer working for the council. Ultimately, the recruitment of the whole directorate was unilaterally determined by one person, eschewing the need to interview anyone, and also used to displace existing officers appointed via interview by declaring their jobs redundant by changing their job titles slightly, and replacing them with her own agency staff. The Executive Director also had the added bonus that she paid herself every time she did it. (Coincidentally, she no longer works for Enfield Council but is now the White City Development Director which is in the borough of Hammersmith & Fulham, so our paths may cross again and, if so, it will be interesting to see if her approach to S106 contributions has changed which, previously, she resisted and managed out of Enfield Council - see Forgotten Powers.)
London boroughs’ clannish approach to selecting leaders seems little different to that of the medieval Anglo-Saxons (the Britons didn’t get much of a look in beyond fictional Arthur, although the Vikings had a good stab at it). The Interview is still part of the council constitution but it seems this too, even when done in the spirit in which it is intended, is being seen now as dysfunctional. It has always been a system that can be gamed and the Guardian commented on Saturday that “If chatbots can ace job interviews for us, maybe it’s time to scrap this ordeal”. It reported that research has found that “if one candidate outperforms another in an informal interview, the chances that they will do better in the job are little better than flipping a coin.” It went on to say this is because employers think they are better at reading people than they actually are and, what they are capable of ascertaining about a person’s character bears little relation to how they can and might perform in a certain job. Council interviews are of the formal variety, though. Candidates are asked set questions with pre-determined answers for which the interviewee is objectively awarded a numerical score based on his or her ability to know the exemplar answer and regurgitate it. Scoring well, therefore, does not mean they know how to do the job well, it just means that they know how to prepare for a council interview. And this tends to be those who have already, or have previously, worked for a council. This is reflected in the pattern that councils are full of officers who have previously been a council officer elsewhere. If the formal council interview is a good way to select the best officers, then the entire private sector labour market must be rubbish. If you think that can’t be right and sounds a bit too close to the way English and British monarchs have been selected, then, as the reporter suggested, perhaps it’s time to “think again about how to recruit the right people.”
On Wednesday, the Contract Manager for Veolia’s rubbish collection contract, in preparation for today’s contract review meeting with Veolia for one of the most important contracts any council manages, emailed the AD for Corporate Procurement again, asking again about whether the procurement process specified whether social value contributions should be made locally or, as Veolia contended in the last contract review meeting, that the specification in the tender said nothing about the borough (see Theirs Not To Reason Why) and that it never occurred to Veolia, no stranger to local government services for obvious reasons, that the Local Government was only responsible for governing the local area. Alas she has no idea so she didn’t reply, causing the contract management meeting to be cancelled.
Why should she know? After all, she has no experience of local government procurement and no-one asked her whether she had any knowledge of it. But she was previously a council officer and was chums with the recruiters. My suggestion is, perhaps the selection process should be based simply on determining whether the candidate has knowledge of how to do what is ostensibly a knowledge job, and not, say, “some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you. If I went round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away.” But the AD for Corporate Procurement gets to wield executive power to determine the specification for the borough’s bin collection and has the given authority to rudely ignore any queries from the service subsequently responsible for managing it. But it is the corporate system, and you’ve got to have a system. No-one said it had to be a good system.
😹
ReplyDelete